by Joanna Walsh
•••
Primitive creatures like us steer by light. Walking back late a super-moon reflects the globular street lamps. In front of the expensive riverside hotels vendors sit impassively draped with HANDMADE LACE TABLECLOTHS centimetres from the tourists eating on the hotel terraces. The tourists look back at them, trapped.
And then the noise, and the parties. Budapest is full, fuller than it could be with only the people who live here. I’ve lost track of time. It’s late. It must be – it is! – Saturday night. Time may not happen to everyone at the same rate, but at least we all agree it’s the same day. Here in the spacious present the hen and stag parties have come to another city to mark time. Hurtling toward settling down they’re in a rush to get old, to set a date, and to fix the setting with some kind of wildness, a fixed, ritual wildness within which, nonetheless, much can happen that is uncertain.
The specious present.
James, ibid
How can it be too late for me, for us, even now? There is still so much that is happening to me for the first time, still so many bridges crossed which I have no recollection of crossing before.
A limo streaks by. Out of the sunroof the upper body of a girl in a white satin bustier, her lower half hidden like a blonde doll’s torso sunk into a cake. Is she a bride on her wedding night, or on her hen night? Or was she picked up by one of the stag parties? As she passes she lets out a long scream. Of joy? Of terror?
6th May
And the morning after, the streets are empty, and the bins in every street are full of empty champagne bottles, with more bottles beside them queuing outside every club entrance.
I have to get to the station to catch a train. I’ve been unable to buy a ticket for the sleeper from Munich. The German network requires a reservation made a week ahead with tickets sent to a terrestrial address. Terrestrial? What century do they think we’re living in?
On my platform a sandwich-boarded girl walks up and down looking grim. After Athens I imagine she is protesting. Then I recognise a word on her chest, the same as in the cake shop. Oh it’s an advert! Apart from Sofia’s ads for casinos and strip clubs, I haven’t seen one of those for a while. On the wall, another poster with the translation: YOU CAN’T SAY YOU’VE BEEN TO BUDAPEST BEFORE YOU’VE TRIED KÜRTŐSKALÁCS (not KUSTOKOLAKS then. How did I misread it the first time, or did I only misremember?) HUNGARIAN SPECIALITY! Well, perhaps I can’t say I’ve been to Budapest, but I can’t say I care. Sitting in the station I’ve already left the city. I am waiting, in the waiting zone again, happy to be relived of the responsibility of where to go, what to do, which was beginning to make me anxious. Chasing edges is a tough job. I am happy to leave decisions on where the borders are to others. We’re not so similar then, you and I: you never took the train, liked to be in the driver’s seat of your old car, although you might not have looked it. ‘I bet you thought I couldn’t drive?’ you asked me. Well, it wasn’t really a question.
And you liked to tell me stories about myself, and your stories surrounded you like the shell of your old, brown car, with you in the driver’s seat. How now brown car?
How now? I’ve no idea how we could be now. Could we be apart, could we be something that happened in the past, and still be something? Could we be like Heloise n’ Abelard? Could we be like Eva Figes n’ Herman Hesse, Muriel Spark n’ Derek Stanford? Could we be like Socrates n’ Diotima (love is pain, art is pain; love is over, art is what’s left)?
I get onto the train and am immediately handed a schedule of the stops in German and English. I know where I’ll be and when. A passenger speaks to me in German. I understand and, to my surprise, am even able to reply. I show her my timetable, and we are both reassured. There is no longer any possibility of breakdown.
How long have I been travelling? Only a few weeks. Feels like thousands. That’s exchange rates for you. Have I got anywhere yet?
The journey is not worth the trouble, because one need not move from the spot in order to be convinced that repetition is impossible… then one travels more briskly than if one travelled by train, despite the fact that one is sitting still.
Kierkegaard, ibid
That depends where I think I’m heading.
I am heading back to Paris.
The Travelling Salesman problem asks how I can get anywhere via the shortest route, alighting at each necessary station. If I travelled from London to Paris, Paris to Nice by train, then on to Rome via Milan, then took a plane to Athens, a bus to Sofia, another to Budapest, it looks for the best route to take me back to Paris, and whether my journey would take longer if I didn’t cross the same bridge twice, and if, when I got there, I would have got any further than if I crossed back on myself, even if it took exactly the same amount of time.
In most cases the distance between two nodes in any Travelling Salesman Problem network is the same in both directions but there are cases where the distance from A to B is not equal to the distance from B to A, and these problems are called asymmetric. Asymmetry is more likely to occur in real cities, thrown off balance by one-way streets, traffic systems, dead ends, and cities where you arrive by plane, but can only leave by bus, or where you land at a certain airport, or station, and must leave by another.
That’s not even taking into account accidents, delays, changes to the timetable, or changes of heart. More often than not my nodes have been dictated by their links, their arcs, rather than the other way around: in Rome I took a plane and, in Thessaloniki, a bus, other links having entirely broken down. As well as the main points on my journey there have been substations, at some of which I could have taken a quicker route, or changed direction altogether, as the parameters of my problem are not fixed. I have bypassed other points, which could have been nodes, like the most beautiful stretch of coast in Italy I didn’t see on the fast train from Ventimiglia. Maybe my journey’s more like the Chinese Postman problem in which all streets must, in time, be visited with some, usually a minimal number, by force of necessity, twice.
But these are nice, nice stories, these problems of time and space. What makes them memorable is that they are about towns in Germany, and bridges in now-Russia-then-Prussia-and-in-between-the-Soviet-Union when they could just as easily have been points A and B, Alpha and Omega. Maths is dirtied with metaphor and metonym: who was the salesman, and why did he cross Germany? Was he selling vacuum cleaners, or Universal Vegetable Slicers, or was he distributing samples of Dobos cake? Could one of his stops have been Königsberg, and if he visited that town, did he cross all of its seven bridges, and which bridges did he find he had to cross twice… or did he miss his connection, or run out of samples, or were the things he carried in his case simply too heavy?
Time cannot be perceived by itself.
Immanuel Kant, Analytic of Principles
The point in each of these algorithms is to travel as little as possible, and to reach the destination quickly, but I have nowhere to stay in Paris until I have made two days pass, and one night in between, so I must go indirectly, via enough nodes to ruffle up my time. If I break time down into memorable activities, more crossings, more halts along the way, it might be easier to go the distance. If I layer time up with events it may seem to pass more slowly or more quickly – the jury’s out on that – at least all the time will be filled and, by stacking up more routes, the time I spend between cities will grow bigger until the journey has the significance of a city itself, with its many streets and tall buildings, its downtowns and uptowns squared by their different atmospheres, its islands and bridges. I will put this city of time between us. Making this time longer (or do I mean quicker?), am I getting any distance on you?
Travel makes time pass more keenly, even if it’s just a trip across a bridge. As the train pulls out of the station it crosses the motorway and I see two tents pitched on the central reservation, and a couple who look like tourists, not vagrants, doing something that will make their visit something to remember: picnicking, pointing, and watching the traffic
.
11 Budapest – Munich – Paris Train
6/7th May
At the first stop out of Budapest a young couple, with a child aged about five or six, get on the train and colonise the table where I’m sitting. The parents bring out food, a handheld games console, magazines, toys, until all surfaces are covered. The father, who wears a gold teddy bear on a thick gold chain round his neck, is attentive. He gives the games console to the child, who plays it loudly on repeat. The father does not turn it down or give the child headphones. The train runs parallel to a disused railway line. May bushes flower between its tracks. The father brings out a commercially predawn teddy bear for the child to colour. Opposite them (next to me) the mother, who wears a hairband with a pink plastic bow, sleeps. She wakes occasionally to eat: prepackaged pastries, salty snacks. The child ignores the colouring sheet. He is not bored yet. The father draws a grotesque bunny of his own, like nothing in nature: the animal of a television watcher, an easter-egg eater. He brings out an array of small, new plastic toys. The child selects one filled with sweets, price label still attached, excavates and eats the candy, then loses interest. Something about him is kidnapped: a prisoner, jollied along by his captors, whom he humours, and something about this is distressing. I want to leave but there are no other seats. The father plays with the new toy, now empty. The boy ignores him. The mother wakes. I eat a square of chocolate. She looks at me resentfully and pops another biscuit into her mouth. She sees the father’s rabbit and, taking the paper, begins to draw her own. The child wails for the paper. The father snatches it and gives it to him. The child pretends to throw something at the mother and she starts back, shielding her face.
I am heading for Paris, where I know people, know the language. The tough part of my journey – the travelling towards unknown words, cities, currencies, the journey away from meaning – is almost done. I have put myself in distress but I have rescued myself. I don’t need you but I can’t help wondering where you are. No contact today, yesterday, the day before, but I have no connectivity. I can’t read the messages you might have sent me. Still, at Munich station I hope there might be WiFi. I hope for connection, and my hope runs to the rhythm of the train: I hope. I hope…
I have only a fistful of Euros but the beer on the dining car menu is cheap. I think I’ll sit and drink all the way to Munich.
•••
Travel is suspense – don’t strangers always meet on a train? It offers glimpses, lends itself to stories, but I so rarely see their ends. The beginning of a story is an acknowledgement of distance, of the distance between us, measured in an ignorance that prompts curiosity. Each story yearns toward completion in such a way that distance, ignorance, is no longer passive waiting, but becomes something active, as the noise of the train carriages pulled helplessly along develops itself into a rhythm, though the pattern may be only in the eye of the beer-holder.
Absence persists, I must endure it – hence I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
In the dining car a group of jolly fifty-something German men buy a beer for a woman perhaps half their age, her skin twice as dark. Having cornered her with the gift of a drink, they play at guessing where she comes from, speaking English, their common language. ‘Yes there’s the war on terror,’ she says, ‘but it’s not as bad as it sounds.’ ‘No burqa then?’ the men laugh, quarrying her with questions, pressing her into personal confessions: ‘How much are you allowed to drink in Pakistan?’ ‘Well,’ she admits, ‘I drink more in Europe.’ ‘What do you do there?’ they challenge her. ‘I work for a UN organisation,’ she says, ‘I want to go back and work against poverty.’ They don’t like this, chase her into details, trying to trip her. Does she know what poverty is like? ‘I spend one week of the month with my father in the fields.’ She is not what they thought. What can they do about it? How can they get rid of the thought of her – young and pretty – also decided, intelligent, engaged? They dismiss her: ‘But you can’t be typical: how many girls in Pakistan are like you?’
The men do not look as though they work against poverty. ‘I have a little factory,’ says the ringleader, the one with red trousers who karate-kicked his way into the dining car (his apology to her, their introduction). ‘I make wooded floors. And laminate. That look like wood.’ He pats the formica surface of the dining car table. ‘But that’s oak?’ she says, hesitating only slightly in her assertion. ‘No!’ he exclaims triumphantly, ‘plastic!’
The girl leaves. The men discuss her in German. I can’t tell what they are saying, but I know it is about her. Still I am envious even of their harrying attention. Was she their type? Why did they choose her, to press with their questions, to laminate with their stories? The Pakistani girl is younger than me but is acne-ridden and a ring of fat surfs the gap between her blouse and her jeans. Why didn’t they choose me? (Am I no better than them?)
Quite frequently it is by language that the other is altered.
Barthes, ibid
The sky covers itself with clouds. We are entering northern Europe.
A young woman in a miniskirt passes through the dining car. The men’s gaze turns to a new prey. They watch, enjoying her struggle to wrangle her heavy suitcase through the narrow exit by the bar. She’s gone before they can stop her. There are two other women alone in the dining car. Will they pick one of them next? Or me? Or should, or could I begin a conversation with one of those women? No. The space of travel is erotic. There is no encounter that is not sexual.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ you said, ‘but you’re just not my type.’ Atypical then, maybe.
‘I don’t seem to have a type,’ I said.
(Of course you meant me to take it personally.)
Atopos… Not my type.
Barthes, ibid
Two women enter. They approach the three men remaining at the bar (their ringleader has gone after the miniskirt). The women are around fifty and are dressed girlishly in holiday tops and cropped trousers, one entirely in yellow, the other in white.
The tables are turned.
The women order beers and comic plates of slippery-dicked hot dogs. I watch them flirting in a foreign language, like a silent film, as they put on a performance for the men about whether they should have cream on their torte (they give in, miming a feigned reluctant acceptance – appropriate to their femininity – of pleasure). Typical. Their show’s a dead circuit, will never strike sparks. But they don’t really mean for it to go anywhere.
But, however little I like the look of them, I wanted the men to choose me! Is my need to be desired all I desire, and does it matter who meets it? No I also desire my desire’s annihilation in meeting its object, which, if it’s you, is something quite particular, atypical.
It’s my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.
Barthes, ibid
The atypical is what can’t be pinned down to one topos, which means category, but also place. The ancient Greeks used loci (place) to think things through: each place a topos – a meeting of space and idea – a topic. Every topos was a mnemonical journey in which a location prompted a memory, an emotion, a stage in an argument, creating a junction of thought that became typical of ground covered, or fought over. But this process was pre-socratic and, it being difficult to write while walking, most of their thoughts were lost. All we’re left with is the word. Loci is plural, the opposite of locus – place – which is an endpoint, static, so what they learnt must have been discovered between places, along the arcs between nodes, though we don’t know what sort of places the Greeks moved from, and to; if they stopped for the man-made, or natural; if they halted at every town, every house, every tree; whether the features that made up their minds were near each other, or metres, miles, countries apart.
I have stopped in passing places, in elevators, on escalators, in corridors, streets, and in the narrow carriages of trains, and thought of y
ou, and, while moving through these moving places I have thought particularly about our walking together, and talking, which is a memory prompted by a similar movement, until this memory seems never to have existed in real space but only as revived by my journey in the present, reattached to a new topos, becoming a new topic, so that I am only almost sure this walking together was something we once did.
As a pattern of argument, a topos tends to travel backwards, from the concluding principle back to the qualifying example to be proved, e.g.: if you and I agree love is X, then there must – or mustn’t – have been love between us. Though it seems odd to travel in this backwards direction, I have, in these passing places, stopped and wondered whether I could backtrack to ask you to meet to walk, and talk, with me again – nothing more – but these thinking paths have led me nowhere but circled back to the point at which I find asking you impossible.
Like the men in the bar, it was always you that asked the questions. To participate, I must acknowledge the place from which I argue, but you claimed the topography. I’m never still, always abroad whereas wherever you travel (or so you claimed), you’re on home ground. Typical.
The atypical is always out of place, like the Pakistani girl. The more she’s pursued, the further away she gets. If he can’t get her, her pursuer fills the gap with a placeholder story, which replaces, but pushes what she really is further away.
My refusal to stop you moving, to typify you, is my defence against you, though it’s a suicidal one. I refuse to fail to admit there are aspects of you I still love, I refuse to reduce you to a type I can embrace or dismiss. The atypical remains unspoken, never set down in words, and love, especially, is so not like love, not like love at all, because the experience of love is always atypical, based on the particular in the beloved. It is outside anything normal, including its own name. All I can speak about is what it is not. What I didn’t say to you must have been evident. I said next to nothing, which was statement enough.